Automated design is now used in various fields. At present, in the most under-developed area of software, various automatic designs have been used for automating design processes, and thus it has been generally acknowledged that a design process may be automated by using the process knowledge of that design process. For that purpose, the systematic acquisition of design knowledge (hereafter, simply as design knowledge) and the systematic construction of the expert system using thus gained systematic knowledge, which is used for design of a system or a program, and this technology has also now being established. Furthermore, the technology for acquiring the design knowledge automatically as well as the automatic design reusing thus gained design knowledge has been established.
For your reference, an automatic acquisition system of the design knowledge and the automatic design system reusing it has been already published by Japanese Patent Publication, Japan Patent Laid-open No. Hei 10-320188.
As is shown later, the quantitative evaluation on this system proved to be very effective in the area of so-called maintenance design where the repetition is the majority. But, since it remains at a level of simple reuse, the system necessitates a human intervention for the selection of the better or the most suitable among the candidates if more than two candidates exist. This is the first problem of this system. It also has the second problem that it is impossible to create quite a new design knowledge automatically. In accordance with developments of new technologies, system developments and the automation of the development in the area of the upper phase such as treating management become a high technology spot.
Thus, the fundamental assignments of the present invention is to reveal the basic structure of the human design knowledge, and to build an expert system using the knowledge that can provide a high degree of automated design like an expertise human designer. In another word, it is the fundamental assignments of the present invention to reveal technologies for automatically creating design knowledge from more basic knowledge, to acquire design knowledge from automatic design or existing designs, and to accumulate thus gained knowledge for revealing and establishing the automatic design technology using thus accumulated knowledge, and further extend its application area to the top level early area of systems.
A 1st object of the present invention is an automatic generation method of design knowledge, the automatic design program and the automatic design system featuring the automatic creation of the design knowledge.
Moreover, a 2nd object of the present invention is to enable an automatic design that creates design knowledge automatically and to attain a high degree of automatic design.
Moreover, the 3rd purpose of the present invention is to enable an automatic design method capable of a high degree of automated design, by accumulating design knowledge which is created or acquired from existing documents, and by automatically selecting the most suitable design knowledge from the accumulated design knowledge based on the decision of the way of the design.
Moreover, the 4th purpose of the present invention is integration means of the automatic creation of the design knowledge as well as the reuse of the knowledge with drawing and display of documents, which have been the effective interface for users.
Moreover, the 5th purpose of the present invention is to attain a total system of the unified system concept applicable from programming to management level decision making by the above-mentioned terms.